One key word to provide reliable AI solutions: crowdsource the chatbots

John Davie wanted Buyers Edge Platform, the hospitality business he founded and continues to lead, to take advantage of the AI ​​wave. When he looked around, the CEO was not satisfied with the options.

The answer was Collective results CollectivIQa Boston-based company connected to the Buyers Edge Platform that provides users with accurate answers to their AI questions by showing them answers that pull data from ChatGPT, Gemini, ClaudeGrok – and up to 10 other species – all at once.

When new AI tools first hit the market a few years ago, Davie told TechCrunch he was excited about the potential and encouraged his employees to try it out. His hope was short-lived.

“We had a bit of a wake-up call about a year ago when we learned that if our employees were just using any AI tools, or even their license, it could be a lot of training for our company,” Davie said. “We could be improving our competition.”

Davie also looked at AI security contracts and found expensive long-term contracts for major language models that produce false positives and alerts.

“We hate to hire employees who deserve AI,” he said. “What made it worse, employees were complaining about false, biased responses.” Sometimes it was giving us vague, inaccurate answers that amounted to PowerPoint presentations and front-end presentations.”

He challenged his chief technology officer to come up with something better.

The result was CollectivIQ. Spinout has developed a tool that queries several major types of languages, including OpenAI’s, AnthropicGoogle, and xAI at the same time. These programs analyze overlapping and divergent data to create a composite solution that is meant to be more accurate than that generated by each LLM on its own.

All data involved in CollectivIQ incentives is encrypted and deleted when used to maintain business confidentiality, the company said.

“As someone who loves technology, you’re always looking for the best, right?” Davie said. “You always wanted to have an iPhone or a laptop or the latest gadget and I wanted to give my employees the best of AI, but there wasn’t anything out there that you know could bring them all together.”

CollectivIQ began rolling out the software within its workforce in early 2026. The initial response was strong, Davie said. After Davie learned that many of the Buyers Edge Platform customers were experiencing the same confusion or hesitation in adopting AI tools, the company decided to take it public.

The software was developed using the AI ​​model enterprise API. CollectivIQ pays for tokens and its customers pay by usage, which Davie hopes will help the company stand out in the crowded AI market.

“I believe this is a breath of fresh air for companies that feel they don’t have to commit,” Davie said. “They just pay the price they get.”

CollectivIQ was fully funded by Davie, who told TechCrunch that he plans to seek outside funding sometime later this year. For Davie, it has been a pleasure to return and create a new company almost 28 years after starting his current company.

“It feels like the past and we’re doing it over and over again and being careless and having grass on LLMs and post graduate courses and all kinds of things that I wasn’t taught,” Davie said. “It’s fun and exciting. I’m going to be hands-on with the software developers, and that’s how I found my big company, it’s really fun.”